High-resolution, high-density screens are expected on most high-end phones and tablets today. Everything from the iPhone 5 to the Samsung Galaxy S 4 to the Nexus 10 is trying to pack as many pixels as it can into a given screen size to increase the sharpness of on-screen text and images.

You often hold a phone or tablet pretty close to your face, so the benefits of a high-resolution, high-density display are easy to see. Perhaps it makes sense then that the technology hasn't been picked up as quickly in laptop computers. To date, there have only been a few serious contenders: Apple's 15-inch and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros, Google's Chromebook Pixel, and now Toshiba's Kirabook.

We're sure that more high-density Windows laptops are on the way, but the Kirabook is the first to make it to market. The laptop raises some natural questions: Does a computer that is both thinner and lighter than the Pixel and the Pros skimp on battery life to achieve these feats? Is the Kirabook good enough to justify its jaw-dropping $1,599.99 starting price? Most importantly, can Windows support high-density displays as well as OS X, Chrome OS, iOS, Android, and others can?

Body and build quality

Specs at a glance: Toshiba Kirabook

Screen

2560×1440 at 13.3" (221 ppi)

OS

Windows 8 Pro 64-bit

CPU

2.0GHz Intel Core i7-3537U (Turbo up to 3.1GHz)

RAM

8GB 1600MHz DDR3 (non-upgradeable)

GPU

Intel HD Graphics 4000 (integrated)

HDD

256GB solid-state drive

Networking

802.11n (2.4GHz only), Bluetooth 4.0

Ports

3x USB 3.0, HDMI, card reader, headphones

Size

12.44" × 8.15" × 0.7" (315.98 × 207.01 × 17.78mm)

Weight

2.97 lbs (1.35kg)

Battery

3380 mAh

Warranty

2 years

Starting price

$1,599.99

Price as reviewed

$1,999.99

Other perks

Webcam, backlit keyboard

The 2.97-pound Kirabook crams the high-density display of a laptop like the Retina MacBook Pro (3.57 pounds) or Chromebook Pixel (3.35 pounds) into something that weighs about as much as the 13-inch MacBook Air. It's a bit thicker than some other Ultrabooks (0.7" compared to 0.5" for Acer's Aspire S7), but it's still light and very easy to carry around in a bag.

Most laptops today are either rectangles or gently rounded rectangles, but the Kirabook splits the difference. Its back corners are rounded and its front corners aren't. This is a simple design touch, but it helps to make the Kirabook easier to identify at a glance. Like other Ultrabooks, it uses a tapered design that's thicker in the back of the laptop (where the system components and fan are located) and thinner in the front, which angles the keyboard slightly toward the user.

The laptop's construction is partly "magnesium alloy" and partly plastic. The lid, palm rest, and keyboard area is all made of a lightly brushed gray metal, while the bottom case is made of plastic that has the same color but no brushed-metal texture. Four round, rubber feet on the bottom of the laptop are also joined by the stereo speaker grilles. The positioning means that sound is amplified slightly by a hard surface like a desk or table but muffled slightly by a soft surface like a couch or lap—either way, the sound quality is as middling as we've come to expect from most Ultrabooks. There's a bit of distortion at higher volume levels.

Update: Toshiba tells us that the bottom of the laptop is also made of magnesium alloy and not plastic—it looks and feels more like plastic than either the lid or the palm rest, but they're apparently the same material. I'm told that the lid is pressed magnesium alloy and that the bottom of the laptop is die cast, which accounts for the differences in how they feel.

Enlarge/ Logos are happily pretty understated on the Kirabook: There's one Toshiba logo on the lid, one underneath the screen in the laptop's bezel, and "Kira" and Harmon/Kardon logos on the palm rest. Windows, Intel, and Energy Star stickers are likewise understated and easy to remove.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ In length and width, the Kirabook is actually a bit smaller than the MacBook Air even though they have identically sized screens. The Kirabook uses a brushed metal texture rather than the MacBook's smooth aluminum.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The power button is surrounded by a light and positioned above the keyboard. The Kirabook's palm rest shares its brushed metal texture with the lid.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The Kirabook is a bit thicker than the 13-inch MacBook Air, but the two weigh about the same. There are two USB 3.0 ports and an HDMI port on the laptop's left side.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ Another USB 3.0 port, an SD card reader, and a headphone jack are on the right.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ There are four rubber feet and two vents on the bottom of the laptop for the computer's single fan.

Andrew Cunningham

There are also two fan vents on the bottom of the laptop, both used for the laptop's single fan. During light and general use, fan noise isn't a problem—in a room with light ambient noise the laptop is essentially silent. It's when the hardware starts straining that things get less pleasant. As the device picks up speed its fan sounds more and more like a vacuum cleaner.

Finally, the Kirabook has a nice selection of ports for a laptop of its size: three USB 3.0 ports (two on the left and one on the right—one of which can be used to charge a device when the laptop is asleep), a full-size HDMI port, a card reader, and a headphone jack.

Keyboard and trackpad

Enlarge/ An all-around excellent keyboard and trackpad. Note that the trackpad is the same shape as the computer itself.

Andrew Cunningham

The Kirabook's keyboard shares similarities with past Toshiba keyboards, but overall the layout is an improvement over what we've seen from the company in the past. Most of the keys are just a bit shorter than they are in other keyboards, but they're just as wide—instead of being square, they're ever-so-slightly rectangular. The bottom row of keys (which includes the spacebar) is slightly taller, and the top row (the function keys, delete key, and a few others) is a little shorter and narrower. Arrow keys are half-height, as they often are in Ultrabooks. The key sizing and arrangement is very easy to get used to if you're coming from any other chiclet keyboard, and I was quickly able to type at my normal speeds.

The quality of the keyboard is also an improvement. Travel is good, and the keys are nice and firm—the mushiness we noticed on last year's crop of Toshiba Ultrabooks is entirely absent. Where the old Toshiba keys were also entirely flat, the Kirabook's are gently scooped to better fit your fingers. The keyboard's backlight is also bright and even. It's important to get the keyboard right when you're making a laptop, and the Kirabook got it right where other Toshiba Ultrabooks have failed.

The trackpad shares its shape with the laptop itself. The top edges are curved and the bottom edges are squared off. Aside from this thoughtful design touch, the trackpad is very much like all the other trackpads we've been seeing in Windows laptops lately. It's a single, clickable piece of plastic with a textured surface that supports multiple touch points. Basic gestures like two-fingered scrolling and pinch-to-zoom work as intended, as do the Windows 8 trackpad gestures. We had no issues with palm rejection. Some specific applications (Chrome, we're looking at you) had trouble with scrolling, but we're more inclined to blame that on Chrome than the Kirabook since other applications were fine.

The screen

Enlarge/ Slim bezels around the LCD help the Kirabook fit a 13.3-inch screen into a package that's almost an inch shorter than the Air.

Andrew Cunningham

The build quality and design of the Kirabook are generally excellent, but the screen is the real star of the show. At 221 ppi, its 13.3-inch 2560×1440 screen is playing in the same ballpark as the Retina MacBook Pros and the Chromebook Pixel. While it's not the first computer to market with this kind of a screen, it's the first Windows PC to include one (we'll talk more about how Windows handles the pressure in a moment).

The display itself is bright and colorful and, as is to be expected, optimized text and images look very crisp. Its viewing angles are worse than what we've seen in other high-end PCs of late, though; colors shift and you'll notice the screen washing out if you bend the screen toward yourself at a 70 or 80 degree angle. The screen doesn't become unusable unless you're looking at it from an extreme angle, but it's not quite as good as either the Pixel or the Retina MacBook Pros. The hinge is stiff enough that the screen doesn't wobble too much when you reach out to touch it, but not so stiff that it's impossible to lift the lid with one hand.

In the higher-priced, $1,799 and $1,999 models, the laptop adds to its list of features a 10-point capacitive touchscreen. The touchscreen uses a layer of Corning's Concore Glass, a scratch-resistant surface which reduces the overall thickness of the screen by integrating the touch layer into the glass itself. This is a bit different from "in-cell" touchscreens we've seen in phones like the iPhone and Galaxy S4, which integrate the touch layer into the LCD display rather than the glass itself (for more information about how modern capacitive touch works, see this article). Corning's marketing materials for Concore imply that its solution is better-suited to larger surfaces, but in both cases the implementation is similar: reduce thickness by integrating the touch layer into one of the others.

We spent some time navigating the OS, tapping and swiping various onscreen elements and playing games. We noticed no particular problems with the screen on our review unit. The screen picks up fingerprints and smudges (a sad but inevitable fact of life with gadgets) but my fingers glide across it without any undue resistance. The glass layer does make the screen extremely reflective, though.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue. Twitter@AndrewWrites

110 Reader Comments

Wow, a Toshiba laptop I could see myself owning, that's a first. Too bad about the loud fan and scaling issues, but at least the latter will probably improve in time with updated software. Well, if very high res displays become common anyways.

Hi-Res screens on laptops are inevitable for two main reasons: the technology is becoming cheaper so it's easier to justify including it (and every company wants to tout some premium on it's products); and the laptops themselves are becoming slightly smaller and more portable. meaning that the screen real-estate is also slightly smaller, and being able to cram more stuff on your screen is nice for the on-the-go worker. As an aside I find (at least under OSX) the sharper screen puts less strain on my eyes during the day. It's a little bit hard to adjust 'down' to a lower resolution screen because everything feels more blurry and harder to focus on. It doesn't seem like much, but for people who are staring at a screen most of the day (probably the majority of us on this site), it's a nicer overall experience. As the screens become more prevalent I think more people will want that experience.

I think Apple is actually antialiasing non-Retina images while doubling their pixel dimensions. This would explain their fuzziness; if they simply subtituted four pixels where one was before, I think it would look blocky but sharp. I guess they think smooth but fuzzy looks better.

There are loads of different ways to rescale an image. This page gives some details and shows examples of the different methods.

I have no idea how Apple's method varies from Windows, though Apple's main advantage is that it doesn't have to deal with a mass of legacy display APIs.

That alone made me cringe. I guess it's better to wait until Intels next gen chips will hit the market.

While the Haswell chipset should be better, HD 4000 isn't bad at all for day-to-day tasks not including 3D gaming. Apple gets away with driving an even bigger display (2,560 x 1,600) with the same chipset in the 13" rBMP.

Most of these are debatable (e.g., the Dock can be smaller, but should it be smaller by default?, Exposé can be configured to use, say, a mouse button to be faster than press-and-hold on the Dock, but should being faster really be the default?). But on one you are simply incorrect; Apps in the Dock can provide custom Dock menu items. This has always been possible for running apps, but a few years ago they added an API to enable it for non-running applications as well.

Meh, most fo the tiny Windows 7 UI details noone cares about are completely overshadowed by Microsoft’s complete lack of understanding for how humans perceive things (stuff like typography, contrast, colors, spatial perception, etc.). OS X might not be perfect, but at least it’s not completely psychotic and illogical. It’s design by committee at its worst.

I was dithering between a Macbook Pro and a Vaio Z and eventually went for the latter, being unable to make the break from PCs. I've been using the Z for around 6 months now and the screen is wonderful. It's "only" 1920x1080 squeezed into 13.1", but the Adobe RGB color gamut is 96%. In contrast (forgive the pun) I think the MBP comes in at around 70%.

That's what I thought too until I got a Retina MacBook Pro. Trust me, they actually looks worse.

I haven't used a rMBP, but I've used a 3840x2400 screen with pixel doubling and it looked fine as a 1920x1200 screen (actually it looked really good). That was nearly a decade ago with Windows XP, so the entire screen had a consistent resolution. Could that be what makes the difference?

I think the problem is that the entire screen does not have a consistent resolution. Normally these "retina" resolution system tried to show high resolution texts at all times. So when you look at a web page, you'll see crisp texts along side (relatively) blurry images. If these images contain texts (such as button images with texts) it'd be even more obvious. That's probably why people think those low resolution images look "worse" on high resolution display compared to normal display.

Why can't Microsoft do some of the scaling for the developers? Why not translate straight font calls into 2x and call it a day? Graphics will be blurry but text won't.

Because it takes one element to be custom drawn or otherwise customized and things go horribly wrong fast. (To see use DPI scaling to 150% and turn on XP-mode and start testing programs...)Many older APIs, many ways to do something (including text rendering) and many broken programs, where programmers did things badly.

Why can't Microsoft do some of the scaling for the developers? Why not translate straight font calls into 2x and call it a day? Graphics will be blurry but text won't.

If you scale up only the fonts, and not the outlying UI elements (borders, fields, etc), it'd probably be a mess.

Not probably. Will be. As soon program doesn't understand DPI scaling things break. Have seen it too many times. Spybot's earlier version (1.2 or so) had bug in DPI (resp. inherited from GUI lib for Delphi), which caused such breakage. In best case you get only partial overlap of elements, in worse case some lements like buttons will be covered completely and thus not reachable by user.)

This whole mess came from time, when Microsoft trusted developers to do right things(and heed taxes like DPI or accessibility) and at the same time wanted to enable as many things as possible. Raymond Chen (The Old New Things http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/) covers this.

Yuck, another small 16:9 display, and for almost $2k? They seem to have missed their target market by a wide margin. Professionals do not need or want an HD aspect screen for real work, nor are most consumers going to spend that to play back movies. 16:9 just doesn't provide enough vertical real estate, nor enough room for a decent sized trackpad. Google has done well with the Chromebook Pixel; 3:2 is more appropriate for the size.

The rounded top and square bottom are amusing; as if they lopped off the bottom of the machine and trackpad along with the display.

Waiting for the Ubuntu Linux review, although I'll probably just get an XPS 13 Developer Edition with 1920x1080 and save high resolution for external displays.

Then I saw this:

Quote:

The laptop also supports 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0 through its Intel 2230 Wi-Fi card but only on the 2.4GHz band. In a cheaper or midrange laptop this would be understandable (if not forgivable), but in a laptop that starts at $1,600 and purports to cater to power users it's hard to understand why dual-band 802.11n or even 802.11ac isn't included. The 2.4GHz band is very congested, especially in more heavily populated areas. The lack of support for the 5GHz band is a fly in some otherwise attractive ointment.

I don't like the fact that the $200 Nexus 7 doesn't support 5GHz, and wish the XPS 13 had a 3x3:3 Intel Ultimate-N 6300 instead of the 2x2:2 6235, and here's an ultrabook, lacking in gigabit Ethernet ports, which doesn't even support 5GHz?!? The fact that the article notes that the 2230 WiFi is replaceable by a 6235 is the sign of thorough coverage, but I'm still predisposed against this unit by such an omission.

This notebook has some promising features, but then has some aspects to it which make me just stop considering it like chiclet keyboad.

My six year old T43 is kind of on its last legs, still works fine, but i want a replacement. I can't find a notebook that emulates its design goals, they're all trying to be apple, but trying to be netbooks (in certain aspects), or trying to be plastic craptastic devices, none of them are doing a decent laptop that ticks every box and I would like to get.

I'm really dirty with lenovo for abandoning the keyboard layout of old, and i wish notebook manufacturers would at least consider 16:10 ratio displays. I can't believe that many of them are still using the ghastly 1366x768 (shudders) resolution.

T430/T530 keyboard is very comfortable and you can choose a screen that is 1600x900 or 1920x1080(T530). A brilliant, solid yet portable machine. What is there to be dirty about?

True, but the screens aren't that great. (aside from the 1080p option on the T530 - but what about those of us who want a smaller machine?) An IPS option would be nice - I'd be willing to pay extra for that.

I don't mean to contradict the article but oftentimes in laptops WiFi cards are *not* user-replaceable because the computer checks the card's specific pci id against a list of allowed ids in the bios.

So the user is left with having to reflash the laptop's bios just to change a card.

I'm not saying that's the case here because obviously I didn't have access to one of those Toshibas but I own a HP laptop that does this (and for which reflashing guides with step-by-step instructions on how to hack the bios can be found on the net).

I was dithering between a Macbook Pro and a Vaio Z and eventually went for the latter, being unable to make the break from PCs. I've been using the Z for around 6 months now and the screen is wonderful. It's "only" 1920x1080 squeezed into 13.1", but the Adobe RGB color gamut is 96%. In contrast (forgive the pun) I think the MBP comes in at around 70%.

The Vaio Z's color gamut is a gimmick. Color gamut is not one of those things where a bigger number is better. 96% aRGB isn't accurate, it's actually oversaturated since aRGB is much larger than sRGB. Assuming your Vaio is uncalibrated, that means that all the sRGB colors will be blown up into aRGB. Even if you do calibrate it, the 6-bit color depth will cause severe banding. Plus, it's a TN display, so you get crap color accuracy at angles.

If you really needed aRGB, you should've gotten a DreamColor Elitebook, which has similar gamut but with a calibrated 10-bit IPS panel that won't make sRGB look terrible either. If not, Apple's "retina" displays are more accurate and of course much sharper.

I was dithering between a Macbook Pro and a Vaio Z and eventually went for the latter, being unable to make the break from PCs. I've been using the Z for around 6 months now and the screen is wonderful. It's "only" 1920x1080 squeezed into 13.1", but the Adobe RGB color gamut is 96%. In contrast (forgive the pun) I think the MBP comes in at around 70%.

The Vaio Z's color gamut is a gimmick. Color gamut is not one of those things where a bigger number is better. 96% aRGB isn't accurate, it's actually oversaturated since aRGB is much larger than sRGB. Assuming your Vaio is uncalibrated, that means that all the sRGB colors will be blown up into aRGB. Even if you do calibrate it, the 6-bit color depth will cause severe banding. Plus, it's a TN display, so you get crap color accuracy at angles.

If you really needed aRGB, you should've gotten a DreamColor Elitebook, which has similar gamut but with a calibrated 10-bit IPS panel that won't make sRGB look terrible either. If not, Apple's "retina" displays are more accurate and of course much sharper.

Thanks for that, madmilk. It pains me to learn that I can no longer boast about something I know very little about, but I'm grateful that educated me a bit!

T430/T530 keyboard is very comfortable and you can choose a screen that is 1600x900 or 1920x1080(T530). A brilliant, solid yet portable machine. What is there to be dirty about?

While the keyboard on the latest Lenovo's is quite comfortable, they are a far cry from the 420/520 keyboards that came before them. I'm a long-time ThinkPad user. I own many ThinkPads and have been buying the latest generation of laptops for a few people at work.

Personally, I won't upgrade to the latest models because of the keyboards. For me, great keyboards and bad display panels (generally) have defined ThinkPads for a while now. It's a shame to see that as they improve the panels, Lenovo are messing with the keyboards.

The W530 keyboard layout is far less usable for programmers at work. They request the W520 over the 530 for this reason alone. For me, the big beef is the lack of a capslock light. It sounds trivial, but I use this all the time when doing systems work to quickly test the state of the machine on the other end. When Lenovo replaced this with a lousy OSD, I'll never know.

It always feels like two steps forward one step back with technology. Such is life.

I haven't used a rMBP, but I've used a 3840x2400 screen with pixel doubling and it looked fine as a 1920x1200 screen (actually it looked really good). That was nearly a decade ago with Windows XP, so the entire screen had a consistent resolution. Could that be what makes the difference?

I think that is a lot of it. I've used my rMBP in Windows running at doubled resolution, and it looks fairly normal -- since everything is at the same resolution. Not quite as good as a native display, since there's always a tiny amount of black between the pixels, I guess -- but pretty good.

I think the problem with the Retina is that when 75% of your interface looks way better than a "normal" resolution screen, the shortcomings of "normal" quality are made much more obvious.

The W530 keyboard layout is far less usable for programmers at work. They request the W520 over the 530 for this reason alone. For me, the big beef is the lack of a capslock light. It sounds trivial, but I use this all the time when doing systems work to quickly test the state of the machine on the other end. When Lenovo replaced this with a lousy OSD, I'll never know.

How is a capslock important to test a remote machine?

I have a T430 and the island-style keyboard is quite nice in general. The inverted-T is good and pageup/pagedown convenient. Other editing keys less so but laptop keyboards are always a compromise.

The W530 keyboard layout is far less usable for programmers at work. They request the W520 over the 530 for this reason alone. For me, the big beef is the lack of a capslock light. It sounds trivial, but I use this all the time when doing systems work to quickly test the state of the machine on the other end. When Lenovo replaced this with a lousy OSD, I'll never know.

How is a capslock important to test a remote machine?

I have a T430 and the island-style keyboard is quite nice in general. The inverted-T is good and pageup/pagedown convenient. Other editing keys less so but laptop keyboards are always a compromise.

What's jaw dropping is not the price, but that Toshiba made a laptop that weighs less than a Volkswagon bus!

Toshiba has a history of making ultralight notebooks going back to the 1990s, in the form of Libretto and Dynabook SS series. I still remember the company-issue Dynabook SS I had in 1999--it felt like it was made of balsa wood (in both weight and toughness!). I love light laptops, but it was so scary carrying that thing around that it was a big relief when I switched jobs and the new company issued me a heavy and indestructible ThinkPad.